Computer-controlled editing systems are well known. As input means, they usually have keyboards, and the information or text to be edited is entered by sequential keystrokes. Commands and other control information are also usually entered by keys. However, other devices for entering control information are also known, including touch-screens, joysticks, so-called mice, graphic tablets, etc.
Once the information is stored, it can be displayed and then edited by inserting additional characters, by replacing characters, or by deleting characters. Whole text sections can also be moved or deleted when suitably identified.
A cursor for highlighting a particular character on the display screen is a standard feature in most editing systems. It marks the location where insertion, replacement, or deletion takes place. Because editing is effected on a character basis--except for the movement or deletion of whole sections--the cursor is also usually valid for a single character position, and its basic movement is one character position to right or left.
Some word processing systems are known in which a misspelling check can be made word by word, then highlighting a full word that was found to be incorrect or unknown. However, control of such movements and highlighting requires delimiters between the words (such as spaces) which must also be entered by keystrokes of the operator. Only a few basic editing operations (such as deletion) are provided for entire words in some word processing systems, but most editing operations (such as input and insertion) are still done character by character.
There is a demand for other techniques than character keystrokes for entering text into a processing system and for editing such text. That is, not all people are familiar with operating keyboards, and many people do not like working on a keyboard. Furthermore, keyboard operation is time consuming. The usual way for doing correspondence is that one person dictates a letter or report and another person, i.e. a secretary, listens to the recorded speech and transcribes it using a typewriter keyboard. It is, therefore, desirable to introduce speech-controlled text input and editing.
A number of speech recognition systems were described in the literature or in patents such as in the articles "Recognition of Isolated-Word Sentences from a 5000-Word Vocabulary Office Correspondence Task" by L. Bahl et al., Proceedings of the 1983 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Boston April 1983), pp. 1065-1067; "Design of a Linguistic Statistical Decoder for the Recognition of Continuous Speech" by F. Jelinek et al, Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3, May 1975, pp. 250-256; and U. S. Pat. Nos. 4,181,821 and 4,277,644.
Most of the known systems recognize only separately spoken words, but some have been designed for distinguishing and identifying words with continuous speech input. Speech recognition systems have been used or suggested for certain applications such as the direct control of machines by a limited set of spoken commands, input of numerical values into computing systems, ordering of goods from supply centers, directory lookup, or for verifying a speaker's identity, but have not included immediate display and editing.
Moreover, speech recognition systems have not been employed with editing that may be initiated by a voice input or a manual input such as the conventional keyboard input.